Family

God put people in families.

Those who are not in families might disagree, but the facts are, those without families are out of place and feel out of place, often, because of it. Young women who feel out of place in their own families often marry early in life, in an attempt to find the feeling of being in a family.

We get a family by being born into a family. Those who were not born to a family may not agree, but the facts are, those not born into a family often are also feeling out of place and have great difficulty, often, in making wise social decisions.

Family should be the foundation of every life, whether the sad facts of our existence allow that it actually is, or not. It should be.

The orphan, widow, or divorcee is never the goal. Parents and spouses make family. Good parents and good spouses make good family.

And family should be the foundation, and not just a very fine thread that barely holds its members together.

And the one thing that separates families probably as much as, or more than, any other one thing is: entrapment.

Entrapment? What?

Yeah.

You’re not entrapped?

Think again.

We are entrapped by the TV, by games, by workaholism, by imagined standards, by debt, by promises, and by many other controlling factors.

Some entrapments, we never meant to get into, but they slowly encircled us.

Others we judged necessary and entered cautiously.

And some, we flew into, headlong, with great delight. And if we notice the entrapment in them, and the way they divide our family, we scratch our heads or shrug, but make no effort to escape. Oh, we do many of them, each at the same time, so we call it family time . . .

Those last ones, the ones we love and shrug about, are the ones I want us to consider.

You see, the word entertain actually mean entrap. Yes, entertainment is entrapment.

Games, movies, music, fantasy, novels–they trap us like sticky traps and we wallow in them as if they were the most important things of life, until we are totally bound up and unable to escape.

If you cannot go 21 days without some entertainment, I’d say your are entrapped.

And your family is divided.

And you don’t have to wallow; there is a way out.